INTUITIVE EATING

I’m sure many of you have heard about Intuitive Eating and you’d like to know more? For many people it’s just a natural way of eating, eating when you are hungry, stopping when you are satisfied, rinse and repeat! No food is off limit, eating everything in moderation is the motto. No big deal right?! Well for people that have a healthy relationship with food, this is just how they eat. For those of us that have had or still do have a disordered relationship with food or even a somewhat unhealthy relationship with food, eating intuitively just doesn’t feel natural. We’ve been so used to food rules and restrictions and we even feel safe in knowing that some foods are just “off limits” otherwise we just wouldn’t be able to control ourselves around said food!

The whole point of intuitive eating, (how I interpret it) is that we need to release the control that food has over us. By allowing ourselves to eat whatever we want, whenever we want. We do that by honouring our hunger and being mindful. This might seem impossible to believe and I used to think so too. Until I tried it and wholeheartedly jumped in with both feed, I thought I was going to drown at first, the lack of control sent me into a bit of tailspin. Within about 6 months I really started to grasp it and the foods I used to “binge” on just didn’t have the same hold over me that they used to.

On one end of the spectrum you have all-or-nothing thinking (aka OBSESSION) and on the other end of the spectrum you have balls to the wall (aka EAT EVERYTHING IN SIGHT). Likely if you are this person when you hear the “Eat everything in moderation” it drives you crazy and makes you want to go on a rant, it used to do it to me, I have many posts on this blog about it. Navigating the middle ground seemed like something I could only dream of and although I am still working on this I feel like I have enough of a handle on it to share with all of you. Eating intuitively is a practice just like yoga, no one is ever good at yoga when they begin. When you use mindfulness with food and your body you can really tune into what your body truly desires, sometimes it’s a Kale Salad and sometimes it’s ice cream.

I am certainly not a pro at this and realistically I am only a beginner, it’s been about 8 months since I started my journey to intuitive eating, hence why I have changed my blog to “Hungry for Balance” because I am HUNGRY FOR BALANCE!!!